The coronavirus pandemic is exposing a growing competition between democratic and authoritarian governments. Jessica Brandt and Torrey Tausing write that as the U.S. and Europe struggle to contain the virus at home, Russia and China are seizing the moment to enhance their international influence through information operations.

One executive order does not a trend make, but maybe two do. On May 1, President Trump issued an executive order banning the acquisition, importation, transfer or installation of any bulk electric power system equipment where the secretary of energy has determined, first, that the equipment was manufactured by a company controlled by—or subject to the jurisdiction of—a foreign adversary and, second, that the transaction poses an undue risk to the U.S. bulk-power system, economy or national security. Jim Dempsey writes “The order’s issuance signals that the administration’s efforts to purge from the nation’s telecommunications network any equipment made in China may represent a new approach to critical infrastructure in general.”

The German government must come up with a new law regulating the German intelligence service (BND), after the country’s highest court ruled that the current practice of monitoring telecommunications of foreign citizens at will – that is, without a court warrant — violates constitutionally enshrined press freedoms and the privacy of communications. Until now, the BND had considered foreign nationals living outside Germany essentially fair game, on the assumption that they were not protected by Germany’s constitution.

China has long deployed widespread censorship, propaganda, and information manipulation efforts within its borders, but information operations directed at foreign audiences have generally focused on framing China in a positive way. In the last two months, however, Beijing, showing itself willing to emulate Russia’s approach to information campaigns, has conducted a much more ambitious effort not only to shape global perspectives about what’s occurring inside China, but to influence public opinion about events outside its borders.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel says there is “hard evidence” of the involvement of “Russian forces” in a 2015 cyberattack on the German parliament in which documents from her own parliamentary office were reportedly stolen. Last week that federal prosecutors in Germany had issued an arrest warrant for a suspected officer with Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency.

The ongoing worldwide coronavirus pandemic hasn’t been immune to the problem of rampant disinformation—intentionally misleading information or propaganda. The European External Action Service of the European Union recently stated that “despite their potentially grave impact on public health, official and state-backed sources from various governments, including Russia and—to a lesser extent—China, have continued to widely target conspiracy narratives and disinformation both at public audiences in the EU and the wider neighborhood.” Thomas Rid, author of Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare, discuss how disinformation has impacted the COVID-19 pandemic.

For months, U.S. officials have been warning about a spike in cyberattacks during the coronavirus pandemic, but they’ve stopped short of pointing fingers at any one country. Now, as the all-out global race for a coronavirus vaccine accelerates and hackers home in on related scientific research, U.S. officials are preparing to single out a long-standing cyber adversary: China.

From navigation to remote banking, mobile device users rely on a variety of applications to streamline daily tasks, communicate, and dramatically increase productivity. While exceedingly useful, the ecosystem of third-party applications utilizes a number of sensors – microphones, GPS, pedometers, cameras – and user interactions to collect data used to enable functionality. Troves of sensitive personal data about users are accessible to these applications and as defense and commercial mobile device users become increasingly reliant on the technology, there are growing concerns around the challenge this creates for preserving user privacy.

In My 2019 the Trump administration placed Huawei on the Commerce Department’s “Entity List” because “there is reasonable cause to believe that Huawei has been involved in activities contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States.” But the decision has had unintended consequences: Because Huawei participates in international standards development organizations (SDOs) which set technical standards development worldwide, the Commerce Department’s decision has created uncertainty regarding whether and how engineers working for U.S. companies can participate in those organizations as well. But if U.S. companies do not participate in SDOs, then U.S. companies’ preferences and priorities will be overlooked, while China’s sway will only grow. Ari Schwartz argues that the United States can pursue its national security concerns with companies like Huawei via the Entity List without the need to silence American voices in vital standards development efforts.

The U.S. Department of Defense earlier this week released three declassified videos of “unexplained aerial phenomena” (the official name for “unidentified flying objects,” or UFOs). The three videos released Monday had already been leaked to the press in 2007 and 2017. Believers in the existence of extraterrestrial life cheered the Pentagon’s release of the videos, but experts caution that earthly explanations usually exist for such sightings — and that when people do not know why something happened, it does not mean it happened because of aliens.

A suspected Russian intelligence agent was reported to have flown into the Czech capital with a deadly mission. The agent was tasked with taking out three local Czech officials, including the mayor of Prague, Zdenek Hrib. Each of the three had taken or supported steps that angered Moscow, including the removal of a statue of a controversial Soviet general and the renaming of the square in front of the Russian Embassy in Prague after the slain Kremlin critic Boris Nemtsov. Western intelligence experts find the alleged plot possible, especially given the number of Russian spies reported to be operating out of the Czech Republic.

Support in the British Parliament for allowing Huawei a role in Britain’s 5G network is collapsing. In January, the U.K. government granted Huawei approval to supply 5G technologies for parts of the U.K. network – with some restrictions, which critics of the deal say are meaningless. The government’s plan requires an act of Parliament to take legal effect, but the opposition to the deal among members of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party has been steadily growing, especially in light of China’s lack of transparency regarding the coronavirus epidemic. Observers now say that the hardening of opposition to the deal among rank-and-file Conservative MPs will make it difficult — if not impossible — to get the legislation passed.

On Tuesday, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a new report, the fourth and penultimate volume in the Committee’s bipartisan Russia investigation. The latest installment examines the sources, tradecraft, and analytic work behind the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that determined Russia conducted an unprecedented, multi-faceted campaign to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. “One of the ICA’s most important conclusions was that Russia’s aggressive interference efforts should be considered ‘the new normal,’” said Senator Richard Burr (R-North Carolina), the committee’s chairman.

U.S. intelligence agencies have assessed that Chinese operatives have pushed false messages across social media platforms, aiming to amplify and exaggerate the actions of the U.S. government in order to sow panic, increase confusion, and deepen political polarization in the already-on-edge American public. The amplification techniques are alarming to U.S. officials because the disinformation showed up as texts on many Americans’ cellphones, a tactic that several of the officials said they had not seen before. American officials said the operatives had adopted some of the techniques mastered by Russia-backed trolls. That has spurred agencies to look at new ways in which China, Russia and other nations are using a range of platforms to spread disinformation during the pandemic. President Trump himself has shown little concern about China’s actions, dismissing worries over China’s use of disinformation when asked about it on Fox News. “They do it and we do it and we call them different things,” he said. “Every country does it.”

In Hungary, Azerbaijan, Egypt, Russia, the Philippines, and other countries, strongman leaders are taking advantage of a distracted international community to reinforce authoritarian agendas. Josef Joffe writes that, in contrast, national emergencies in the West do not breed despots, nor the grasping security state. Joffe argues that those who predict that the coronavirus epidemic will facilitate an authoritarian takeover, ignore four critical points – all of which contribute to making Western democracies resilient in the face of challenges such as an epidemic and other crises.

The long view

President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that his administration could not have prepared for the pandemic because no government agency could have known that such an out-of-the-blue outbreak would happen. Justin Coleman writes that the president’s claims are false. The U.S. intelligence community began to warn about a global epidemic in November, saying that the outbreak in China could develop into a “cataclysmic event,” and policymakers, decisionmakers, and the National Security Council at the White House were repeatedly briefed on the issue. The coronavirus first appeared in the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) of intelligence matters — placed on the president’s desk every morning — in early January.

While the COVID-19 public health crisis grabs the headlines and kills tens of thousands, state-actors and transnational terrorist groups continue to purloin data, spread disinformation and plan terrorist attacks. Jason M. Blazakis writes that the U.S. national security community’s ability to detect threats may be less than optimal because Human intelligence (HUMINT) collection — a key tool to combat terrorism — is impaired during COVID-19.

Calder Walton writes that following Russia’s “sweeping and systematic” attack on the 2016 U.S. presidential election—which was intended to support Moscow’s favored candidate, Donald J. Trump, and undermine his opponent, Hillary Clinton—the media frequently labeled the operation “unprecedented.” “The social-media technologies that Russia deployed in its cyber-attack on the United States in 2016 were certainly new,” he writes, “but Russia’s strategy was far from unusual. In fact, the Kremlin has a long history of meddling in U.S. and other Western democratic elections and manufacturing disinformation to discredit and divide the West.”

A new study surveyed hundreds of technology experts about whether or not digital disruption will help or hurt democracy by 2030. Of the 979 responses, about 49 percent of these respondents said use of technology “will mostly weaken core aspects of democracy and democratic representation in the next decade,” while 33 percent said the use of technology “will mostly strengthen core aspects of democracy.”

This year started horribly for China, with a respiratory virus spread in Wuhan, and the Chinese government hiding the truth about it from the world. But the draconian measures taken by the government appears to have worked, and Wuhan is back to normal (to a new, post-COVI-19 normal, that is). The Economist writes that China’s Communist Party hails this as a triumph not only for Chinese science: the country’s vast and well-oiled propaganda machine explains that China brought its epidemic under control thanks to its strong one-party rule – and the fact tat some Western democracies – chief among them the United States – have botched their response to the epidemic shows that Western liberal democracy is an inferior system of government compared to China’s own. “Some, including nervous foreign-policy watchers in the West, have concluded that China will be the winner from the COVID-19 catastrophe. These observers warn that the pandemic will be remembered not only as a human disaster, but also as a geopolitical turning-point away from America,” the Economist writes.

Recent moves by the administration mark another concrete step in the U.S. campaign to limit the digital and economic influence of Chinese telecommunications companies both within and outside U.S. borders. Justin Sherman writes that “The moves also demonstrate that current American efforts to limit the influence of the Chinese telecommunications sector are much broader than just the well-publicized targeting of Chinese telecom giant Huawei.”

In Hungary, Azerbaijan, Egypt, Russia, the Philippines, and other countries, strongman leaders are taking advantage of a distracted international community to reinforce authoritarian agendas. Josef Joffe writes that, in contrast, national emergencies in the West do not breed despots, nor the grasping security state. Joffe argues that those who predict that the coronavirus epidemic will facilitate an authoritarian takeover, ignore four critical points – all of which contribute to making Western democracies resilient in the face of challenges such as an epidemic and other crises.

U.S. intelligence agencies have assessed that Chinese operatives have pushed false messages across social media platforms, aiming to amplify and exaggerate the actions of the U.S. government in order to sow panic, increase confusion, and deepen political polarization in the already-on-edge American public. The amplification techniques are alarming to U.S. officials because the disinformation showed up as texts on many Americans’ cellphones, a tactic that several of the officials said they had not seen before. American officials said the operatives had adopted some of the techniques mastered by Russia-backed trolls. That has spurred agencies to look at new ways in which China, Russia and other nations are using a range of platforms to spread disinformation during the pandemic. President Trump himself has shown little concern about China’s actions, dismissing worries over China’s use of disinformation when asked about it on Fox News. “They do it and we do it and we call them different things,” he said. “Every country does it.”

One executive order does not a trend make, but maybe two do. On May 1, President Trump issued an executive order banning the acquisition, importation, transfer or installation of any bulk electric power system equipment where the secretary of energy has determined, first, that the equipment was manufactured by a company controlled by—or subject to the jurisdiction of—a foreign adversary and, second, that the transaction poses an undue risk to the U.S. bulk-power system, economy or national security. Jim Dempsey writes “The order’s issuance signals that the administration’s efforts to purge from the nation’s telecommunications network any equipment made in China may represent a new approach to critical infrastructure in general.”

In Hungary, Azerbaijan, Egypt, Russia, the Philippines, and other countries, strongman leaders are taking advantage of a distracted international community to reinforce authoritarian agendas. Josef Joffe writes that, in contrast, national emergencies in the West do not breed despots, nor the grasping security state. Joffe argues that those who predict that the coronavirus epidemic will facilitate an authoritarian takeover, ignore four critical points – all of which contribute to making Western democracies resilient in the face of challenges such as an epidemic and other crises.

U.S. intelligence agencies have assessed that Chinese operatives have pushed false messages across social media platforms, aiming to amplify and exaggerate the actions of the U.S. government in order to sow panic, increase confusion, and deepen political polarization in the already-on-edge American public. The amplification techniques are alarming to U.S. officials because the disinformation showed up as texts on many Americans’ cellphones, a tactic that several of the officials said they had not seen before. American officials said the operatives had adopted some of the techniques mastered by Russia-backed trolls. That has spurred agencies to look at new ways in which China, Russia and other nations are using a range of platforms to spread disinformation during the pandemic. President Trump himself has shown little concern about China’s actions, dismissing worries over China’s use of disinformation when asked about it on Fox News. “They do it and we do it and we call them different things,” he said. “Every country does it.”

One executive order does not a trend make, but maybe two do. On May 1, President Trump issued an executive order banning the acquisition, importation, transfer or installation of any bulk electric power system equipment where the secretary of energy has determined, first, that the equipment was manufactured by a company controlled by—or subject to the jurisdiction of—a foreign adversary and, second, that the transaction poses an undue risk to the U.S. bulk-power system, economy or national security. Jim Dempsey writes “The order’s issuance signals that the administration’s efforts to purge from the nation’s telecommunications network any equipment made in China may represent a new approach to critical infrastructure in general.”

The coronavirus pandemic is exposing a growing competition between democratic and authoritarian governments. Jessica Brandt and Torrey Tausing write that as the U.S. and Europe struggle to contain the virus at home, Russia and China are seizing the moment to enhance their international influence through information operations.